Al Sharpton aside, manufactured events like the ones used on DailySurge.com are just BS pumped up for the haters on the right. Just tit for tat nonsense striking back in an ugly way to counter the Sterling fiasco.

Bard, why do you fall for this stuff? I think that you are searching around in the wrong places. It's a waste of time, and it reflects poorly on you. Do I really care what Al Sharpton says?

Regarding Sterling, I think that he got a raw deal. In my view, it's just more manufactured news and nonsense that's illustrative of what's going on with 24/7 cable news and internet blogs.

I'm glad you said that. Sterling would have lost more if there'd been no NBA sanctions. Now we have a feeding frenzy pumping the value of the franchise up. The hysteria is outrageous.

Sincere but misguided people make that line fuzzy, IMO. Kucinich, Goldberg, even Clooney are at least honest, direct, and articulate, which puts them way ahead of idiots like Pelosi, Frank, Schumer, et.al.

Is memorial day a day set forth by the end of slavery? To honor the 257 Union Soldiers that the confederate put in a mass grave. Of the 25 towns claiming the start of memorial day which one , Who gets to write the history? So which should be taught, I believe all should be taught including the below that I had never heard about till this year.

It was in this Confederate state, says historian David W. Blight, that a very different origin of the holiday took place. In this story, it wasn’t a decorated war hero or a Northern businessman who founded Memorial Day, but rather, a group of black Americans who had once been slaves. The entire purpose of the day was to celebrate the men who gave their lives to end slavery, and thus, this version of the holiday’s history puts a very different spin on which soldiers were intended to be recognized.

On May 1, 1865, says Blight in his book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, up to ten thousand people participated in re-burying 257 Union soldiers and then cleaning and decorating the graves in a proper cemetery setting. Ten days prior to this “Decoration Day,” the men in the town, mostly ex-slaves, worked to prepare the new memorial graveyard which they named “Martyrs of the Race Course.” They also built a large fence around the area and built a formal archway welcoming visitors to honor the fallen soldiers.

This Decoration Day was filled with music, marches, trumpets, and dozens of speeches by Union representatives and supporters. Thus, in Welles’ version of the story, the first Memorial Day was not so much about remembering all of the United States’ fallen soldiers but about celebrating the sacrifices of the Union Army only. The Charleston origination version, although set in the South, will most surely displease many Southerners; the first Decoration Day definitely did not include any recognition or honors bestowed upon Confederate soldiers, and the holiday was not set in motion to recognize all soldiers equally. Given that the South today still is replete with Confederate flags, this version of the story may not be very popular in that region. Memorial Day continues to have a controversial past and disputed history. The real story is very likely a solid mixture of all recorded versions of the holiday’s true origins.

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

Progress is an essential tenet of America’s civic religion. As someone born and raised in England, where “not bad” is a compliment and “could be worse” is positively upbeat, this strikes me as an endearing national characteristic. But as with any religion, when faith is pitted against experience, faith generally wins. And at that point, optimism begins to look suspiciously like delusion.

Since 1977, when Gallup started asking people if they thought they’d be better off the following year, a huge majority have said yes. A 2005 poll revealed that even though only 2 percent of Americans describe themselves as rich, 31 percent thought it very likely or somewhat likely that they would “ever be rich.” And as in most religions, those who have the least are the most devout. Despite entrenched and growing inequality, the poorer people are, the more optimistic they are likely to be about their future financial health.

The sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down school segregation, offers yet another chance to gauge the progress toward racial equality in America. During this bumper period of civil rights commemorations—the current decade presents a litany of markers, from the uprisings in Birmingham to Martin Luther King’s assassination—the official mantra rarely changes: we have come a long way, but we have further to go. “To dismiss the magnitude of this progress…dishonors the courage and the sacrifice of those who paid the price to march in those years,” said Barack Obama, celebrating the March on Washington last year at the Lincoln Memorial. “But we would dishonor those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete.”

Who could argue with that? Half a century ago, America was officially an apartheid state, with black people denied the basic rights of citizenship in large swaths of the country. Then the signs came down; the laws were overturned; the doors to the polling stations were prized open. The notion that the work is proceeding perpetuates the myth: America has no reverse gear—we just keep going forward.

But the awkward truth is that when it comes to the goals laid down by the civil rights movement in general and Brown in particular, America is actually going backward. Schools are resegregating, legislation is being gutted, it’s getting harder to vote, large numbers are being deprived of their basic rights through incarceration, and the economic disparities between black and white are growing. In many areas, America is becoming more separate and less equal.

According to research recently conducted by ProPublica, “black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades.” A recent Nation article illustrated how this trend is largely by design. In suburbs across the region, wealthier whites have been seceding from their inner- city school districts and setting up academic laagers of their own. The result is a concentration of race and class disadvantage in a system with far fewer resources. In a 2012 report, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project noted: “Nationwide, the typical black student is now in a school where almost two out of every three classmates (64%) are low-income.”

The discrepancy between black and white unemployment is the same as it was in 1963. According to the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University, between 1984 and 2007 the black-white wealth gap quadrupled. The Supreme Court is dismantling affirmative action and gutting voting rights. Meanwhile, incarceration disparities are higher than they were in the 1960s. And as Michelle Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow: “Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

This is not to say that we have literally reverted to a bygone era. “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” goes the proverb. “For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” We have a black president, a black attorney general and a black editor of The New York Times; there’s a growing trend to interracial relationships; suburbs are becoming more diverse. If the civil rights movement had been about getting black faces in new and high places, its work would now be done. But it wasn’t. It was about equality. And the problem is not that we still have a great deal of progress to be made or that progress is too slow—it’s that we are regressing.

This is not the first time this has happened. After the abolition of slavery, there was a brief period during Reconstruction when African-Americans made great strides, followed by a full-scale retrenchment in the South with the advent of Jim Crow. “The slave went free,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois. “Stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” In his speech, Obama acknowledged that “we’ll suffer the occasional setback.” But there’s nothing “occasional” about this: the current reversals in the achievements of the civil rights era are akin to those after Reconstruction. That period lasted almost ninety years, and it took a mass movement to end it.

King saw this coming. After he was booed by young black men at a meeting in Chicago in 1966, he reflected, “For twelve years, I and others like me had held out radiant promises of progress, I had preached to them about my dream…. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.” In some quarters today, this would be considered blasphemy.

This is why I mistrust the educational "reform" movement. It has aspects of neo-apartheid in it.

Today, June of 2014, where is the racism? Sterling was getting a lifetime achievement award from the NAACP last month. Now he's getting spanked and humiliated.

There are more Hispanic students in the UC system in California than whites today. When you add foreign (Chinese etc) whites are a small minority today. White privilege is over.

Events of 50 years ago are important. But events today are more important. IMO, liberal policies have destroyed black communities far more than some buck tooth rednecks spouting off. Like I've said before. IN 50 YEARS THIS NATION WILL BE BROWN. This is an unstoppable trend.

And finally, please don't "Uncle Tom" the millions of black conservatives who now realize that our 1st black president should have been a conservative.

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